What price justice?

The law, we believe, dispenses justice. If someone does something bad to you, the moral balance can be redressed through either seeing that person punished, or receiving some sort of compensation. But if you talk to people who’ve been the victims of terrible crimes, you find that justice doesn’t always mean the same thing from one individual to the next – and compensation is far from being the end of the story.

Supporting Information

Transcript

Maggie Alexander: (Reading) ‘Dear Mum, I am sorry for the trouble I have caused you and I know you hate me. I must go and I must tell you this, although it will cause a row. I have never told you because I was scared of the row, but now I’ve found courage to tell you. I hate Dad, because he’s always trying to be rude. He says, “Let me kiss your titty and it will make you feel good.” Also he says, ‘I’d like to go in you.” And I’m scared of him, Mum. He’s only started this very recently. Also I am sick of sneaking out and living in a glass cage when he’s around. By the time you read this, I’ll be 100 miles away. Good luck, goodbye and good luck with the old man. Maggie.’

(Music)

Yes, it was round about 12 or 13 and I’d been suffering sexual abuse at the hands of my father. And I found it all too difficult. So I wrote a letter to my mother in the hope that this might help stop what was happening.

William Verity: The idea for this program started from a conversation I had three years ago with a woman living in a small coalmining community just out of Sydney. I was working on a newspaper at the time and doing a series of articles on people who had volunteered to become living books for the local library, to tell their story to all comers.

There was the SS soldier, decorated twice with the Iron Cross, who promised to devote his life to peace if he survived the war. There was a woman who suddenly lost her sight in middle age and learnt, in the words of the song, to see though she was blind. There was a drug addict who used meth amphetamine to self-medicate her bipolar disorder and ran naked down the street. But none made more of an impact than Maggie Alexander, a courageous woman who’s lived a tough life, starting with abuse by her father.

When she wrote a letter telling her mother what was happening, her mother did nothing. And to this day she is shunned by her siblings for speaking out.

Maggie Alexander: I was probably around 11 years of age when this began, and, you know, my dad had always been my knight in shining armour. I fell off my pushbike and he’d pick me up and he’d, you know, tussle my hair and see that I was OK. But something changed. And Dad always wanted me to go for drives with him of a night, if he had to pop down to the chemist, or pop out to see somebody for work. And then he started to say, you know, ‘Sit on my lap and you can drive the car.’ And of course, like all kids, that’s your dad, so I’d do that.

But then Dad started to do things. His hands would wander. And I didn’t like it. I was uncomfortable and I let him know. And one night coming home he got quite angry because I wanted to jump out of the car. And that was the beginning. And then when my mum wouldn’t be at home and I would be at home alone, Dad started to make advances towards me and he would push me on the floor in the hallway. And then he would come into my bedroom at night.

And my sister shared my bedroom with me, so obviously when he came in I was very quiet. And then the last time that he came to my room, he actually asked me, ‘Did Daddy hurt you last night?’ And it was after that that things began to change. Maybe he realised the depth of the problem, the depth of the abuse. And I was very lucky that I never fell pregnant.

(Music)

I think that those years of abuse will affect me until the day that I leave this earth. It has affected every relationship I have had. My father took a lot away from me. He took my innocence, but more than that he took my trust. He broke my trust. I mean, he was the best thing since sliced bread. He was a dad that had a smile as wide as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, he whistled and he sang and he was so loved and liked by his own family, his extended family, and by those whom he worked with. But they didn’t know the other side of him. They didn’t know that he could be a cold and hard, harsh man. Or if they did, they chose not to. I think he took from me the ability to form solid relationships with people.

William Verity: So when you received silence from your mother when you’d taken this brave step to write to her and say, ‘This is what’s happening under our roof,’ how did that make you feel?

Maggie Alexander: This, again, it’s difficult because you’re thinking back to how you felt, but you still feel the same. I guess I felt betrayed. Because why would I make something up? Why would I say that these things had happened?

How did I feel about Mum? Well, I guess I felt many, many things. My mother lived in an era where women were to remain at home, keep the home fires burning, and the man was the man of the house. But I felt that Mum should have said something. But she did say to me she asked my father. Now, whether she did or she didn’t I will never know.

William Verity: And then I asked Maggie a question that I ask all the people I meet for this program: What does justice mean for you?

Maggie Alexander: I don’t know that I’ve found justice. I find justice a very hard word. I can’t even use an analogy for it. Have I found justice? Yes, if I think through the things that I have done and achieved, that has been my salvation, it has been my justice. But morally, religiously, legally, have I found justice? I don’t think so. My justice is what I have found for myself.

Michael Cockram: No one should ever mix up the concepts of law and justice. Justice is not law. Law is a pale approximation of what somebody might consider justice in a particular situation. But it is so generalised that seldom would it deliver what, in a moral sense, people would regard as justice.

Pete Simpson: Well, justice to me means that the penalty fits the crime, you know? And for every action there’s a consequence, I guess. I was asked once by a lawyer who I did an interview with on TV, not long after Ebony’s killer had been sentenced, and he said to me, ‘You’ve got what you want, Pete. What do you want now?’

And at the time I was just so incensed with that question, because to me it would have been obvious what I really would have wanted is to have my daughter back, have my life back how it used to be. I think he asked that question because the killer of Ebony had been sentenced to life meaning life. And perhaps in a lawyer’s eyes he thought that should be the end of it. But that’s only the end of one aspect of it.

Ray Jackson: Justice means to me… it’s the satisfaction of knowing that finally it’s been recognised that there was an issue, it recognises that you or individuals have suffered from what went on there and that something has been done.

Robert Stephens: Justice to me means that I can live my life without hindrance of any kind as long as I don’t hinder anybody else. Justice means equality. Justice means that you are not above me, you are not below me, we are on the same level. And I will respect you as I expect you to respect me. That is justice.

William Verity: So what are we to believe? Is justice about money? Indeed, can money ever deliver justice? Or is it about retribution, punishment? Or is it about something else entirely?

If there’s one man who might be able to tell me about the history of justice, of where the idea comes from, it’s Simon Longstaff. He’s the executive director of the St James Ethics Centre in Sydney.

Simon Longstaff: Well, typically there are a range of meanings which people are invoking when they mention the concept of justice. It’s an issue which is vexed. There was a time in the past where if some wrong was done to you it was up to you to try and redress that. And so might in a sense was right. The strong secured a greater proportion of ‘justice’ than the weak might do. But we decided, in our society, that in fact that was a very imperfect system.

And political philosophers and jurists and others have explained this, but in essence it was to see a thing called ‘the king’s peace’, which was originally quite narrow in its application, extended across all of the land or realm. And the intention of this was that no single individual would be able to take the law into their own hands to correct some wrong which had been done to them.

We all benefit from that system as a whole and we accept, if you like, some of the loss of autonomy that we would otherwise exercise, because of the greater good that we get through the rule of law.

William Verity: Yes, but what do we actually mean by justice?

Simon Longstaff: Look, it begins with a fundamental idea that is certainly very dominant in western ethical thinking and I think in most parts of the world, and that is that every human being has a fundamental and intrinsic dignity. Some people look to this because they’re made in the image of God, some look at it to do with a capacity for reason. There’s all sorts of ways that people get to this endpoint, but the recognition of intrinsic dignity is a core to ethical thinking.

William Verity: So if justice is about human dignity, where should I look in our own country if I wanted to find the opposite? If I wanted to find injustice?

Simon Longstaff: I think in relation to Indigenous Australians, if we just start with our own country, there is the most comprehensive renunciation of that fundamental principle around respect for persons that occurred in Australia.

Newsreader (archival): The Stolen Generation inquiry accuses past governments of genocide. The federal government has released the findings of a Human Rights Commission Inquiry into the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families seven weeks after receiving it. The inquiry accuses past governments of genocide and says the stolen children should receive compensation.

Cheryl Kernot (archival): It’s not so hard to say you’re sorry. Isn’t that what we teach our children all the time? (Applause) I believe, I believe the ability to apologise is a sign of emotional maturity. On behalf of many Australians, in a spirit of reconciliation and owning and learning from our real history, I take this opportunity to apologise for the past policy of stealing Aboriginal children from their parents. I apologise for the pain and trauma inflicted on an entire generation of Indigenous Australians and their families. I apologise for the way in which this injustice has been ignored in the past and I apologise for the way in which some are sliding around it in the present. (Applause)

Ray Jackson: My name is Ray Jackson. I’m the president of the Indigenous Social Justice Association. I’m part of the stolen generations and my story, as told to me by my adopted mother, is basically that my Australian father went to fight during the Second World War, got killed up in New Guinea, and as a result of that the authorities, as was the practice of the time, decided that as his children were half-caste and their mother was Aboriginal, they should be taken from her.

William Verity: Uncle Ray Jackson has worked for two decades as an activist in Aboriginal rights and in particular fighting to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody. It’s the only way he knew to fight the injustice in his own life: his own loss of family and identity and the efforts of his adoptive mother to keep it secret.

Ray Jackson: My mother refused to tell me about anything else. And for a few years there it was a situation of a lot of daydreaming as to where I came from. And naturally enough, being young, I always put myself as the son of a millionaire, or royalty or, you know, never the poor side of things—it was always going to make me rich and happy.

I made the decision then not to attempt to go any further with it. Later I did. I tried to find out. I went out to Orange and looked through the phone book and didn’t even know what I was looking for. Without names, you’re nothing. You can’t go up to an Aboriginal person out at Orange and say, ‘Oh, I’m Ray Jackson.’ What the hell does that mean to anybody? I obviously have a birth family out there. Whether my birth mother is still bloody alive or not, I don’t know. I have siblings somewhere. But I’ll never find them. I’ll never know them. I’ll never be able to look at them and say, ‘That’s my brother. That’s my sister. That’s my mother.’ I can’t say those things. So that’s the void.

Speaker (archival): Prime Minister.

Kevin Rudd (archival): Mr Speaker, I move that today we honour the Indigenous people of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations. This blemished chapter…

William Verity: So what if we say sorry. How far does an apology go towards providing justice for a great wrong?

Ray Jackson: I consider the apology from Paul Keating in Redfern Park to be a far better and more satisfying apology than Rudd’s little soiree up in the Big House.

Paul Keating (archival): (Applause) If it isn’t reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians, the people to whom the most injustice has been done. And as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us—the non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with an act of recognition, recognition that it was we that did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice and our failure to imagine that these things could be done to us.

Ray Jackson: If you’ve been wounded by somebody, somebody’s abused you or done something to you or against you, if that person is genuinely sorry then you can come to terms with it. Half an apology is nothing.

Announcer (archival): The nation’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, has publicly apologised to a victim of clergy abuse. Cardinal Pell is just days away from taking up a senior role with the Vatican, but he spent much of this week explaining the actions of his archdiocese during its long-running battle with abuse victim John Ellis. Tonight, Cardinal Pell is giving his final mass at St Mary’s Cathedral before leaving for Rome.

Journalist (archival): Well, Juanita, it is a party tonight here at St Mary’s for Cardinal Pell, but it was anything but for him today at the Royal Commission. He faced another few hours of intense grilling about his exact role in the John Ellis litigation and whether that court action was legally or morally correct. But right at the end he did take some time to apologise to John Ellis.

Journalist (archival): Cardinal Pell had spent much of this week at the Royal Commission explaining the actions of his archdiocese in the handling of the John Ellis case. While he acknowledged some failings on the part of the church, he hadn’t apologised until today.

George Pell (archival): At the end of this gruelling appearance for both of us at this Royal Commission, I want publicly to say sorry to him for the hurt caused him by the mistakes made.

Journalist (archival): John Ellis was sexually abused by a Sydney priest in the 1970s. Though the church privately acknowledged that the abuse had occurred, when Mr Ellis tried to sue for damages, the church fought the case in court.

George Pell (archival): As a former archbishop and speaking personally, I would want to say to Mr Ellis that we failed in many ways—some ways inadvertently—in our moral and pastoral responsibilities to him.

Journalist (archival): John Ellis said little at the conclusion of the hearing.

(Music)

William Verity: John Ellis is in a unique position to know about the high price of justice. Not only has he spent more than a decade fighting for recognition from the Catholic Church for his past abuse, he’s also now a lawyer, specialising in sexual abuse cases. What was his take on that apology?

John Ellis: If that had been delivered personally to me—and not in the third person and delivered in that public forum—and delivered face to face, I think it would have been a very powerful thing.

(Music)

What will sit with you as feeling either affirming in your life and helping you to move forward or as something holding you back that is unfinished business, will be what the process was: how you were treated through the process, how you were responded to through the process, whether you felt in control of things, whether the process helped you to get a sense of having a greater degree of control over your life, whether the process gave you a sense of some accountability being placed outside yourself.

And this is particularly in the context of victims of childhood abuse, that until accountability is placed somewhere else the accountability sits with the child, who is now an adult and sometimes an elder. But they’re still operating as a child with the shame and the guilt of what has happened to them that they feel responsible for. And the magic—if I can use that term—of having a successfully resolved processI think comes out of that reassignment of accountability.

William Verity: So is that enough? If you get a full and public apology, is that victory? Or is victory something else?

John Ellis: My sense now is that every time I turned back up and stood in my truth, that was a victory for me. Because that’s what it’s got to be about. It’s got to be about who we are and how we walk our life’s journey. And that’s the only thing… you know, I suppose the logical conclusion of that is that we can only deliver justice to ourselves. And maybe that is the answer.

William Verity: So what about the idea of repentance? How important is it if the perpetrator expresses genuine remorse for their actions?

John Ellis: It’s something that I think can be very, very powerful, and it’s something that, as you’d appreciate, that’s rarely available, it’s rarely delivered. To have that done genuinely I think would be the most powerful experience for most people. I just want him to recognise what they’ve done and say they’re sorry. And I think if that could happen more, that would probably be the most powerful element of healing that people could have.

William Verity: You’re listening to Encounter on RN and I’m William Verity. And this week we’re looking at the notion of justice. What do we mean by that, and is it ultimately worth the heavy price we pay?

(Knocking on door)

William Verity: Hi, Pete.

Peter Simpson: Hey, Will, how are you going?

William Verity: Yeah, good. Good to see you again.

Peter Simpson: Long time, eh? Come in.

William Verity: I’ve come to visit Pete Simpson, the father of Ebony Simpson, who was murdered in the small New South Wales town of Bargo in 1992. She was abducted on her way home from the school bus, sexually abused and thrown into a dam with her weighted schoolbag.

Pete and I have known each other for a few years. We both love motorbikes and we’ve both lost daughters—though in very different ways. I’m hoping to find out from him not about apologies—because he’s never received one of those—but about punishment, after his daughter’s killer was given one of the greatest punishments we can deliver: life meaning life and never to be released.

Peter Simpson: Yes, I’m Peter Simpson, and I’m the father of Ebony, Ebony Simpson, who was murdered, many years ago now.

William Verity: OK, let’s start with the really big question. How has this changed your life?

Peter Simpson: Oh, it’s changed my life in every single area. Absolutely. Every single area. If you’re going to ask me how…

William Verity: I am.

Peter Simpson: …we’ll be here for hours. Oh dear… gee… where to start. I don’t know where to start. Just even to this day it just goes on and on and on, the impact.

Journalist (archival): The youngest of three children, nine-year-old Ebony Simpson was last seen yesterday afternoon. After catching the Bargo school bus, she was let off less than a kilometre from home, the only passenger to alight. Normally met by her mother or father, yesterday she was alone, her distraught parents raising the alarm after Ebony failed to show.

Peter Simpson (archival): We hope very much that she doesn’t come to any harm. And if anybody knows anything if they can please get in touch with us, or if anyone’s got her could they please return her to us.

Journalist (archival): Describing their daughter as a dependable, reliable girl, her parents said Ebony wasn’t the type to run away or get lost. One hundred and thirty centimetres or 4’9”, she was wearing a blue tracksuit, a pink parker, and she was carrying a pink bag.

Peter Simpson: Pete Simpson’s not the only one in the world that has triggers about sadness and loss and I’ve come to understand that. You know, life is full of tragedy and loss and I’m more… I guess how it’s changed me is that I’m more in step with that with other people. Those sort of people impress the shit out of me, who get on with their life in the face of so much loss and sadness, you know?

William Verity: So how does one find justice? And I’m talking justice in life here, not merely justice at law. How does one find justice from another human being, who shows no recognition, let alone any remorse, for the brutal murder of your child?

Peter Simpson: Yes, he used to be in my head quite a lot. And in the early days, I wanted to do what we’re doing: I wanted to see him and sit across from him and I wanted to eyeball him and I wanted to ask him questions. But it was very important to me back in that time, because he’s never had to face me, he’s never had to look me in the eye and he’s never had to listen to me, which is still important to me to try and get that across to him.

But I’ve chosen… for a long time now… I made the decision not to see him and I made the decision to put him and his name as far out of my mind as I could so that I could get on with my life.

William Verity: So what was it that Pete Simpson wanted from his daughter’s killer?

Peter Simpson: I wanted a realisation from him as to what he’d taken, without any regard for that little girl, like for her future. He just wiped out that little girl’s future—you know what I mean? Like, no more birthdays for Ebony, no 21st birthday. And I’ve been conscious of that over the years, because the date came when she would have been 21. She would have been 30, 30-odd now, 31 perhaps, and the weddings and all the nice things, you know? All the high school formals and all the usual things that normal children grow into, you know? And like her netball, you know—she was a very good netball player—and we used to love watching her and she would have gone a long way with that. He cut that out of her life and our lives, you know?

And I was trying… I would have liked to have got across, in some way impacted him, as to the… you know, the ramifications of taking a young person’s life in the manner in which he did. This man was always a thief, but he took from me the greatest treasure that I had—my youngest baby daughter. And any form of theft now that I come across—and I’ve come across it quite a bit, obviously; in fact, I had my house burgled at one stage—that’s an area where my anger comes out like an avalanche—you know what I mean? And I know there’s a lot of thieves around. But I just can’t stand thieves now, because he… if that makes any sense to you, this man took from me the greatest possession that I had at that time.

And I don’t forgive him for it and what right did he have? Does he know… does he think about my ex-wife, who carried that child for nine months and who got up through the night and brought that child up to a healthy nine-year-old girl, you know, who was happy and bright and healthy… you know, athletic and… He just… he’s got no comprehension of what he has stolen.

That’s a heightened sense of justice in me that it takes over my thinking and my being and preoccupies me and… sorry, but I think that’s probably made me more of a vague person on a day-to-day basis, because I’m often off somewhere else in my mind.

William Verity: So if I understand you right, what you want from him is a full recognition of what he’s done.

Peter Simpson: Yes.

William Verity: But also if he had a full recognition of what he’s done, he couldn’t live with himself.

Peter Simpson: Well, one would hope so.

William Verity: And if that occurred, in a parallel universe, would that be justice?

Peter Simpson: Yes. That would be justice in my view, yes.

William Verity: And how would that change you, sitting here?

Peter Simpson: Yeah, um, it would free me up, I think. It would free me, free my mind in some way, make me feel… almost make me feel like I’ve been let out of jail, if that makes any sense. Because, although I am free and I do do things like most free men… but yeah, it would be a, certainly be a real cleansing of my brain perhaps, of all that shadows in my mind, the darker side of things.

William Verity: It’s hard to argue with a father who is consumed by rage that a child rapist and killer still lives and breathes while his daughter does not, a criminal who has earned his life behind bars and has committed others, who are innocent of any crime, to another kind of life sentence. Yet it’s a bleak view of justice and I want to believe that we could do better.

(Music)

Michael Cockram: You’ve only got to ask someone that’s, say, had a family member murdered whether… let’s say that the offender got a life sentence, did that in any way reduce the pain. Well, the answer is it doesn’t really matter how long they go to prison. Some people think, well, if you take another life to balance the life that’s been taken that that’s justice. They can have their neck stretched or go to the electric chair, but the pain doesn’t go away, because the pain is related to the event and to the person that’s died. So it’s not a way to resolve pain.

Justice implies an equality of treatment. If they’ve been broken, making them whole again. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can go back to the beginning again; for example, if a person’s been killed, that person’s not going to come back to life again. If you think in terms of, ‘Oh the person has to come back to life again,’ well, obviously justice is never possible.

William Verity: Michael Cockram is a Christian and a retired lawyer. For the past nine years he’s worked in prisons in Western Australia, bringing together convicted criminals and victims of crime. I ask him what initially sparked his interest.

Michael Cockram: Well, actually I’d been visiting prisons for over 30 years, trying to get prisoners to have a look at their lives and make some changes. And I did that in the context of, really, of Christian evangelism. And I found that there were times when it was remarkably effective, but on the whole it was an unsatisfactory experience, mainly because prisoners saw you coming and they learned the game very quickly. And prison officers would say to me, ‘Michael, you see them in the chapel, I see them in the cell block.’ And I knew exactly what they were telling me. They were saying, ‘There’s no change. You’re just getting people manipulating you for their own benefit.’

William Verity: So you were looking for a more effective way of reaching the prisoners.

Michael Cockram: Yeah, yeah. Well, my hope was that there would be real change. And every now and again I saw something that looked pretty genuine. But I think I was conscious, really from the beginning, that there was a missing element, which was of course the victim of the crime. And those people were not being addressed, nor did I know how to address them.

William Verity: It’s clear from what you are saying that something very powerful is going on when offenders meet victims. And I’m wondering if we can just kind of pare that down, have a look, and see perhaps what it is that, for those of us who aren’t yet in jail or aren’t yet a victim, what we can learn from that. Where does that power come from, do you think? Why is it such a powerful healing process?

Michael Cockram: I think it’s got to do with truth. Most of us live our lives and we live our lives in a kind of netherworld, a cloudy world where people seldom tell exactly what is going on inside. We shield ourselves from the very, very powerful light of truth. And there are good reasons for that, of course, because truth can make you vulnerable, particularly if it’s uncomfortable truth. And do I trust this person with my truth?

When one’s dealing with offenders and victims of crime, the truth is almost… the most difficult, powerful truth is almost impossible to escape. And the presence of this truth and the awareness of it and the knowledge that you’re getting at is extraordinarily disarming and instructive. And it creates a level of bonding in a very, very short time that is very, very hard to describe.

(Music)

William Verity: How has it affected your life?

Michael Cockram:My life?

William Verity: Yes. Your life.

Michael Cockram: Well, a lot of the time I’m… OK, how it’s affected me is that I’ve had to face up to my own life. In other words, I’ve had to deal with issues that I’ve probably buried for many years. Like every other human being, there’s areas of my life where I’ve been intensely hurt, where we’ve been victimised by horrific crime.

But at the same time there are things that I did, particularly as a young man, that are now a source of deep shame to me. And I buried it when I was younger and now I can no longer bury it. And am I really proud of the way I’ve behaved, particularly when I was a young man? And the moment I ask the question, I’m afraid my answer comes back in a way that… and I think, ‘Oh God. Have I got to go into that?’ And the answer is, ‘Well, you want them to be honest, you going to be honest?’

William Verity: Talk to me about how this process has influenced or changed your Christian faith.

Michael Cockram: I was a late convert to Christianity. It was a powerful experience and I wanted to take that somewhere and I spent probably about 30, 40 years pursuing God, I suppose you could say. In more recent years, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m never going to find, never going to catch up with God—God’s a mystery—and that I’d be much better served focusing on humanity, on the mystery that is human… that are human beings.

So the less I actually push God out into the centre of everything, the more present God seems to be. I can go through a day and not mention God at all, but by the time I get back I have this feeling that God’s been on my shoulder the whole time.

(Music)

William Verity: On RN you’re listening to Encounter, with me, William Verity. And this week we’re looking at the notion of justice. What do we mean by that, and is it ultimately worth the heavy price we pay?

So what part does punishment play in justice? Why do Michael Cockram’s jail programs succeed where so many other punishments fail? Professor Kathleen Daly has spent more than two decades studying justice and has a particular interest in innovative ways of achieving it.

Kathleen Daly: I’m very interested in the question of doing things differently and innovatively. But I think punishment is actually essential to justice, so I’m very different from some of my other colleagues, who say we should get rid of punishment. That’s an absurdity. We can’t get rid of punishment. We can’t will it away. It’s too firmly entrenched as an idea.

However, I am thinking about different alternative punishments. I think we just need to redefine the meaning of punishment, but we can’t get rid of the term—it’s just too strong and too important.

William Verity: Kathleen Daly argues that we should censure the offence but not stigmatise the offender, that remorse—which means so much to victims—is most likely to come from those who feel themselves to be a part of society, not those excluded and behind bars. And now we’re back to the idea of justice as a rebalancing, as a means of regaining equilibrium.

Kathleen Daly: I take a very broad view of what punishment is and can be. When an offender is sitting in the circle and there are family members of the offender and the victim is there and the victim has their supporters, what the victim is looking for in a metaphorical sense is a flinch—a flinch of pain, a flinch of recognition. They are looking for a pang of conscience that that person did something wrong.

Now, to me that’s what we should be trying to develop. But we have done is gone the excess, all the way up to capital punishment, where the pang is completely corporal and done. But it is that flinch—that’s what people are looking for, because they say with that pain comes a sense that, ‘You absorb my harm. You absorb the fact that that inequality that you created by crime—that is, by taking advantage of me—now we are in an equal position, because now you have been hurt.’

William Verity: But what if that person who wronged you, who abused you when he thought no one was looking, occupied the highest office in the land and was revered as a war hero? And what if you were an orphan thousands of miles from home, a child trying to survive in a labour camp, where your protectors were too often also your tormentors? What hope then would you have of achieving equality, of justice?

For Fairbridge orphans, British child migrants shipped to Australia throughout most of the 20th century, this is the fight that they’re finally taking to the Supreme Court, though with most of them in their 70s, time is running out.

Robert Stephens: The children can walk out to the island there and it’s just a little wilderness. It’s also, it protects the wildlife too, from foxes…

William Verity: I meet Robert Stephens on a glorious autumn day, at his historic homestead outside Canberra. As we sit under a tree, talking about how far he’s come since leaving England at the age of seven, I put it to him that he’s living proof that the scheme actually worked, that it gave the orphans the chance of a better life.

Robert Stephens: I can understand what you’re saying, but what is success? I still miss not having parents. I still miss not knowing my father. Those things are still part of me. I have a conscience that I don’t often talk about. I don’t know that when I was bringing up my children that I was a good father.

One of the big problems with Fairbridge is that you were never taught to love, and you never had anyone that said, ‘I love you.’ And most of us that went through that situation never had that experience. And so it’s very difficult that when you leave there, you’re socially inept, you don’t know how to handle girls, you don’t know how to do whatever. And bringing up you own children it’s very difficult to hug them, because you were never hugged as a child yourself.

(Sound of children playing)

William Verity: Let’s go back right to the beginning. Tell me about your early days and how you ended up in Australia from the UK.

Robert Stephens: Goodness, that’s a long, long story. I’m a war child. My mother served in the air force in the war, in the United Kingdom. Her husband was in India at the time and he was a lot older than she was. She met my father while working in the air force and had a relationship during the war, of which she had two children—I being the first of the child. And obviously it was difficult for her at the time and I was put into an orphanage virtually a few days after I was born, in Havant.

So my story is a little bit different to a lot of others—that my mother was just not in a position, both emotionally and financially, to be able to cope with having a child, even though tragically later on in life that resulted in her taking her life. She had difficulty coping with the situation.

William Verity: What were some of the issues at that farm just outside Orange?

Robert Stephens: It was the old system where the older boys abused the younger boys, or had them doing things. And the cottage mothers showed a blind eye to that sort of situation.

William Verity: So what kind of… when you say ‘abused’, what do you mean by that?

Robert Stephens: Sexual abuse, physical abuse, things that go on in schools which should never happen, and Fairbridge was rife with that. But it’s an issue that’s hardly spoken about today.

William Verity: Robert Stephens sees himself as one of the stronger Fairbridge orphans and so is a key figure in a class action against Fairbridge that’s working it’s way slowly through the courts.

Robert Stephens: The whole Fairbridge justice issue is not about money, it’s about righting wrongs that were done. It’s about giving dignity back to a lot of children that went through those institutions and have had a tough life. It’s about an incident that happened to me and several other Fairbridge children with a former governor-general that, whilst it can’t be put right, justice in that case can be that it can be recognised that it happened and something done. The problem with the something…

William Verity: Are you prepared to be specific about that?

Robert Stephens: Oh yes. In terms of what happened? Yes, I mean…

William Verity: Yeah. And the identity of the former governor-general?

Robert Stephens: Oh, the former governor-general was William Slim. He visited Fairbridge on a number of occasions. He used to drive around the farm with boys in the car and do inappropriate things. In my case…

William Verity: So he would sexually abuse them in the car.

Robert Stephens: He’d sexually abuse them. And in my case, and David, the chap with me, we were given the opportunity to… as he was leaving, we were asked if we would like to ride in the governor-general’s car down the drive to Fairbridge. And who’s going to say no to that? Beautiful Rolls Royce and man in uniform and all looking…

And we get into this car, and the Fairbridge drive’s about a kilometre, two kilometres long. And all of a sudden we’re sitting on his knee and he’s got his hands up your trousers. Totally inappropriate. Now, for a 10 or 11-year-old, it’s not something you could talk about at the time. And if you had, people would have just laughed at you and told you not to be a silly arse or whatever.

And part of the injustice of it is that it has been too hard for society to handle that a man in his position did things like that. But we now know that many men in his position did things like that and it was always hushed up, put under the carpet, or you were told it didn’t happen, you were imagining it and all the rest. But it did happen.

William Verity: Right. It’s clearly an unequal fight—a 10-year-old orphan against the governor-General of Australia.

Robert Stephens: Absolutely, absolutely.

William Verity: Who’s going to win that?

Robert Stephens: Absolutely. And, now, if we talk about justice for that, in my mind something should be done about it.

William Verity: What does justice mean to you?

Robert Stephens: Justice means to me, it’s the satisfaction of knowing that finally it’s been recognised that there was an issue. It recognises that you, or individuals, have suffered from what went on there and that something has been done. Now, whether it’s about support for later on in life, which a lot will need, whether it’s about making sure that when you reach a certain age in your life where you are going to need proper home care you’re not shoved in another institution, that you’re properly looked after because of where you came from in the first place, that to me is what justice is about.

(Music)

William Verity: So we’ve heard that justice is about rebalancing, that it’s set by society and not by the individual, which is why individuals so rarely feel that they’ve achieved justice. We’ve heard that it may be about saying you’re sorry, though a half-hearted apology may be worse than none at all. We’ve heard that the quest for justice may also come to define a life and when done skilfully and without motivation of revenge, it can lead to a fine life indeed.

Justice is about recognition, even if that means the one who wrongs you needs to flinch in pain. It’s about telling your story and having it heard. It’s about radio programs like this—little by little.

But if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that in the end, no one can give us justice. It’s something we need to claim for ourselves. This was the lesson learnt the hard way by the man abused by a priest when he was an altar boy and who fought the Catholic Church for a decade to be heard. The final words belong to John Ellis.

John Ellis: My sense now is that every time I turned back up and stood in my truth that was a victory for me, because that’s what it’s got to be about. It’s got to be about who we are and how we walk our life’s journey. And that’s the only thing… you know it’s… I suppose the logical conclusion of that is that we can only deliver justice to ourselves and maybe that is the answer.

(Music)

William Verity: On RN you’ve been listening to Encounter. Thanks for your company this week. I’m William Verity.